WESTPORT — The life and legacy of civil-rights giant Martin Luther King Jr. will be commemorated by the Westport community with a three-part celebration this week.

The featured guest and keynote speaker is Junauda Petrus, a writer, playwright, filmmaker and performance artist.

The local King tribute, observed for a 17th year, is co-sponsored by Westport/Weston Interfaith Clergy, the Westport Library, the Westport Country Playhouse, Westport/Weston Interfaith Council and TEAM Westport.

Petrus’s debut novel, The Stars and the Blackness Between Them, received the 2020 Coretta Scott King Book Award, and she is writing a screenplay adaptation of the book, according to a press statement.

“I am overjoyed to be reflecting on the legacies of justice, tenderness, and peace that honoring MLK Jr. situates us in,” Petrus said in the statement.

Her visit to Westport will focus on “reimagining community diversity, engagement and civility,” according to event organizers.

On Friday, Jan, 13, Petrus will join programs planned at the town’s schools.

The Westport Library will host a series of activities starting at 11 a.m. Saturday, Jan. 14, with the theme, “Justice, Art and Healing: An Afternoon of Creative Activism,” with Petrus joined by other artists. To register for the library programs, click here.

Culminating the weekend-long tributes to King, Petrus will deliver the keynote address at 3 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 15, at the Westport Country Playhouse, 25 Powers Court. To reserve a free ticket to the program, click here. Petrus also will sign copies of her book at the event.

The playhouse program will include a dance performed by students from the Regional Center for the Arts.

“Over much of the past decade, the MLK keynote has featured world-class speakers with profoundly timely updates and insights to facilitate racial understanding,” Harold Bailey Jr., chairman of TEAM Westport, said in the publicity release. 

“This year, throughout MLK weekend, we are delighted to have Junauda Petrus in Westport to extend that track record, with the added dimensions of her talent as an award-winning writer, poet and performance artist. Furthermore, her strength as a young adult author should broaden our engagement of young people throughout the area,” Bailey added.

Among her accomplishments, Petrus wrote and directed, “There Are Other Worlds,” described as an “ancestral-circus-poem-play,” with a cast of Black women telling the story of an activist incarcerated for most of her two teenage daughters’ lives. She also co-wrote with Erik Ehn and performed in the puppet-gospel-musical, “Queen.”

Petrus also is an aerial acrobat of the corde lisse — a hanging smooth rope — and uses her background in West African and Afro-Caribbean dance to explore themes of “Blackness, queerness and wildness,” according to the publicity statement.